this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
225 points (93.4% liked)
Technology
59735 readers
2567 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This will vary by state but most states use paper ballots which are counted by voting machine, but the ballots themselves are kept as a backup. This is how recounts happen in very close elections, but also notable that recounts are mostly a roll of the dice to see if enough human errors stack up in the right direction to change the outcome in favor of the otherwise losing candidate
My understanding based on what I remember hearing a family member who works the polls explain is that they are locked up, then transported by the manager of that poll to presumably the county clerk who then takes possession of them and again they are kept under lock and key. These paper ballots also have to match up with a separate ledger of voters and signatures from that polling place, so even if someone added or subtracted ballots in between it would be identified. They would have to replace the ballot, which I believe is also numbered so they'd have to also forge an identical ballot of the correct ballot number to replace it with.
My understanding of the process is they'll have two teams of people repeating eachother's work on sets of 50 ballots, verifying the ballot matches the ledger tallying the votes then check if their counts match for every batch of 50, if the two teams counts do not match they recount the batch of 50 until the two teams counts match. So miscounting and not catching it is difficult, but if you've got 200,000 ballots and you assume an error rate of 1/10000 that's potentially 200 votes that might flip due to pure human error. It's a roll of the dice for the candidate, but if you lost a key county by 75 votes then you've got decent odds of the recount changing the outcome of that county election
Thanks for your explanation. A counting machine is still concerning but I'm a little less concerned now.